


Don't Remember Me

by asocialconstruct



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon-Typical Violence, Dehumanization, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, but there is a happy ending, not actually a happy recovery fic, relatively speaking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:11:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3279707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asocialconstruct/pseuds/asocialconstruct
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve didn’t recognize him the first time, and wasn’t that a hell of a thing.  He was just back from his morning run when Bucky texted him a selfie with a Captain America busker in Times Square.  The previous day’s date on the newscrawl behind them.  Steve’s knees gave out, and he sat on his ass right there on the kitchen floor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Remember the Man I Wanted to Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [berryfunkedup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/berryfunkedup/gifts), [the_nerd_word](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_nerd_word/gifts).



> Title and chapter titles are taken from the song ["Don't Remember Me" by Communist Daughter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dxfVlTgHsw). Berry and NW, you two dragged me into this fandom, so this is for you even if you don't like it :P
> 
> There will be implied past noncon off screen in future chapters, but not shown. Past suicidal behavior is discussed in detail but not shown. Other tags might be added as necessary.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://a-social-construct.tumblr.com/).

**Steve**

Steve didn’t recognize him the first time, and wasn’t that a hell of a thing.  It was a coffee shop in Portland, Steve trying to calm down and give Sam time away from his nervous pacing in the hotel room when another lead went cold.  Portland wasn’t the first place he would have guessed for a Hydra holdout, but the handful of corpses Bucky left for them to find said otherwise.  

It was disturbing the first few times, single bullet hole between the eyes every time and a look that said they’d all recognized who’d come for them.  Or rather, the executions weren’t disturbing, it was the way they’d made Steve feel.  It was all too clean, all of them dying fast, clean, simple deaths that left Steve shaking and angry with his own uselessness.  ( _deep breaths, big guy, we’ll find him_ )

The cafe was mostly empty, an older couple with their newspapers, some hipster types with their laptops and their headphones tapping away in the cool grey light.  Steve sat with his back to the door, sketching his anxiety into the lines of the scene in his sketchbook.

He drew Bucky ordering coffee before realizing it was him.  A soft grey sweater over a blue flannel, head turned towards the barista so that Steve could see his smile but not his eyes.  

It was the shoes that made him look up as the man left, paper cup americano in hand.  The shoes caught his eye because they had leather soles instead of rubber, wingtips shined up just a little too proudly to fit the rest of the vintage look.  Dancing shoes, and Steve had his mouth half-open to ask where the man had found them before realizing that the slight shine between sleeve cuff and cardigan pocket was wrist and not bracelet.  Had a half second of thinking he’d started seeing Bucky’s face on strangers as he took in rumpled hair just long enough to curl and a beard that would have been disreputable when they were young, but was only hipster now.

It was the eyes that told him it was really Bucky, a half smile on Bucky’s lips as he took a sip of coffee on his way out the door, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes in Portland any more than it did in London in 1944.  Steve was up and after him so fast he spilled his latte, but Bucky was already gone.  Steve stood out on the step of the coffeeshop, wondering if he’d finally lost it.  No clue which direction Bucky had disappeared in.

( _Pull it together Rogers, think_ )

His phone buzzed with a text as he stood there at a loss.  Sam, or Natasha, or Tony, checking up on him, and he almost didn’t look at it.  ( _how’s the hunt for sleeping beauty going, old man?_ ) Finally made himself look at it in case it was Sam, breath caught short and heart racing when it wasn’t, almost dropping it to the concrete step as he cast around for where Bucky had disappeared to.

<UNIDENTIFIED NUMBER, 1:32PM. nice drawing of my ass. lose your tail and we can talk>

Not a daydream and not a stranger, then.  Steve took a breath to steady himself, glancing down the street, torn between curling around this first real contact and running after shadows.  <Bucky?> he finally settled on for a response, stupid and lost.  ( _Eloquent, Rogers, no wonder you’re a hit with the ladies._ )

<with you til the end of the line, pal.  i’ll drop the tail for you if you can’t shake him>

Steve dropped to the step, not trusting himself to stay upright for this, needing to stay outside where he’d be visible to Bucky.  <No one’s following me, Buck. There’s no Shield and no Hydra anymore>

<check yr 4oclock> _dumbass_ , Bucky didn’t add.  And sure enough, Sam’s new car was right there in the parking lot of the diner across the street.  Steve could just make out Sam’s profile through the front window, reading his tablet and eating something.  Pie, maybe, Sam had watched a show early on in what he was calling the Roadtrip of Justice about regional diner pies and had been making a point to stop for pie when they hit a new city.  Steve had given up finding a sour cream and raisin that matched his memory of it a few weeks back.

<Sam’s a friend.>  Easier than trying to explain what all Sam was and had been for Steve, since DC.

<hasn’t been out of sight since DC>  That took the breath out of Steve, the idea that they’d been chasing after Bucky and the whole time he’d been close enough to know their movements, keep track of where Steve and Sam were in relation to each other.  And in the half second it took him to wonder why Bucky had waited this long to make contact, it struck him that this really was the first time he’d been separated from Sam since leaving DC.

<We’re freelance now.  Just let me see you, Buck.>

His phone went quiet for so long he thought about texting again, but just as he worked up the nerve to add _please_ , it lit up again.  <sure, pal> was all, and so clear Steve could almost see the tense, disapproving line of Bucky’s frown.  The one that said he didn’t agree, but wasn’t going to start a fight over it.

Nothing after that.  For days stretching into weeks.  Steve never mentioned it to Sam, trying not to think about why when he crossed the street to have a piece of pie with Sam, who had the decency to look embarrassed being caught.

* * *

Bucky texted him more than a month later, after they’d spent weeks chasing shadows up and down the west coast.  <meet you at home> was all, and Steve dropped everything to rush back to New York without explaining it to Sam.  ( _last one’s a rotten egg, Stevie!_ )  He’d been eleven before he’d figured out that Bucky let him win exactly half the time.

They crashed at Stark Tower for a week until it became clear that Bucky wasn’t in a hurry to make contact again, and Steve rented an apartment in Brooklyn by himself when he finally figured out why.

* * *

Steve held out for two more weeks.  He finally texted ( _where are you how are you why have you waited so long what have I done why can’t I see you when can I see you_ ) <?> when he couldn’t take it any more. 

Got the answer four days after, when he started to go so crazy with it he almost told Sam what was driving him up the walls.

The phone buzzed in his pocket during a PR meeting with Stark, Natasha, Sam, and the legal department, and Steve almost huffed out a laugh with the absurdity of it.  

<couple more errands.  why didn’t we text when we were kids? so convenient>  Bucky was so damn normal he almost couldn’t take it, torn between wanting to chase him down or beg him to come home, both at the same time and more.

<Where are you?> he settled for instead.

<busy, punk>

<hurry up, jerk>  Steve slipped his phone back in his pocket and tried to act innocent when Natasha caught him smiling at his phone.

* * *

He was just back from his morning run a week later when Bucky texted him a selfie.  A motherfucking selfie with a Captain America busker in Times Square.  The previous day’s date on the newscrawl behind them.  Steve’s knees gave out, and he sat on his ass right there on the kitchen floor.

Short hair, clean shaven, that stupid smile.  Wire framed glasses and a pastel polo shirt under a fleece hiking jacket.  He looked like a highschool phys ed teacher.  Looked nothing like the Bucky he knew, not Bucky in the thirties trying to pretend his hardest that everything was going to be fine, not Bucky after Zola, not Bucky after Hydra.  Looked everything like Bucky might have if he’d been normal and happy in 2015 instead of lost out of time.  So much so Steve barely recognized him, and the thought of that almost broke his heart.

<Playing tourist?> Steve texted, trying not to hope for an answer.

<one more errand til vacation> Bucky texted right back.  Steve spent the rest of the day pacing the apartment trying to will time to move faster, trying not to over think what came next.  ( _keep it together, Rogers, deep breaths_ )

* * *

He did such a good job calming himself down and getting ready to wait that he wasn’t ready for it when Bucky found him the next day.  Cold, clear, shading into fall, the kind of crisp that had Steve wishing he’d brought a second cup of coffee from the cafe just to hold on the walk home.

“Hey punk.”

He pulled up on a motorcycle, blocking Steve as he crossed a side street, looking so much like Steve’s fantasies that it was only Bucky’s shoes that told him it was real.  Same shoes he’d had in Portland.  Leather dancing shoes.  New and perfect and shined, expensive in the way that had always caught Bucky’s eye when they tortured themselves walking by the Macy’s windows at Christmas.  Worn a little at the heels, broken in like a favorite pair.  Navy blue peacoat against the chill and a helmet that hid everything but his eyes through the visor.  

Beautiful and so perfect he almost couldn’t have been real, but there he was.

“You lost your tail,” Bucky smiled, a little muffled through the helmet, tossing Steve one of his own.  “Get on.”

All Steve thought about as he straddled the bike behind Bucky was to wonder if Bucky had worn the shoes so Steve would know it was him.  He put hands on Bucky’s hips carefully, and could practically feel Bucky’s smirk back at him when Buck reached back to put a hand on Steve’s thigh and pull him closer before revving the bike and pulling away from the curb.  

It was unsettling, being on a bike behind someone for the first time in years, suddenly all this contact after months of chasing Bucky but not direct.  He could feel the metal through Bucky’s black gloves when he reached down to briefly squeeze Steve’s hand, and if the feeling wasn’t familiar, the gesture was painfully so.

( _Ready, Rogers? Don’t punk out on me now._ )

Didn’t even think to ask why when they started to leave the city behind, heading north on I-87.  Albany or Montreal or Mars, didn’t matter, he had Bucky back, and better than he’d had any right to hope for.


	2. I Wish I Didn't Have to Love You This Way

**Steve**

Albany, not Mars.They pulled up to an apartment building across the river from the Capital plaza, Steve caught halfway between being lulled by the long drive and vibrating out of his skin trying to figure out what to say.Three and a half hours wasn’t long enough to figure it out, and he stood there stupidly looking at the helmet in his hand as Bucky set the kick stand.What he wanted to do was wrap himself around Bucky and never let go, for fear that Bucky would disappear the second he looked away, but he couldn’t make himself look up first, afraid that the second he did, Bucky or whatever was standing in his place would dissolve.One of those illusions that dissolved if you looked at it too closely straight on.

“Come on, Rogers,” Bucky said, and folded Steve’s hand into his.

The apartment was small and quiet, big windows overlooking the river.About the same size as the one they’d shared in Brooklyn, seventy years ago, three years ago, Steve couldn’t tell any more.A big bed, a small kitchen, and a desk all in the same room, too many bookshelves.Bucky gestured at the door leading to the bathroom and set their helmets down on the desk, shucking out of his peacoat.The coat draped over the desk chair like a dead thing and Steve only caught a flash of Bucky’s metal hand before it disappeared into the pocket of his sweatshirt.Steve’s hand ached with the emptiness of where Bucky’s had been.

“Well.That’s the dime tour,” Bucky said, with something that was meant to be a laugh.He looked fine, but he sounded tired.As tired and suddenly uncertain about this as Steve felt, and Steve made himself actually look Bucky in the face for the first time.

Bucky looked him dead in the eye, half challenge, half wariness.His face had lost some of the hollowness, filling back in a bit to someone his mother might have recognized, but he was older than before, older than he should have been.Harder around the edges than Steve remembered, closed off in a way the Winter Soldier hadn’t been.

Steve stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from just grabbing Bucky.He was here.Alive.Sane.Kept the left hand in his pocket, the unspoken problem hanging between them but kept out of sight for now.More than Steve could have asked for, more than he’d hoped for, and it left him rudderless because he hadn’t even thought to plan for a Bucky that didn’t need him.

Steve cleared his throat, looking for something to say.The room was cool, like a window had been left open or the heat was turned down.Lived in, a spare pair of shoes tucked under the bed and a bowl, a whole bowl, of oranges on the kitchen counter.Books, everywhere, stacked by the bed and the oranges and lining the shelves opposite the windows.

“It’s nice,” Steve said, for lack of something intelligent to say.“You—uh—you been reading a lot of Wittgenstein?”( _Smooth, Rogers, real smooth._ )

Bucky half shrugged, half smiled at the awkwardness of it.“Subletting, philosophy student.Those’re mine,” he said, gesturing vaguely to another bookshelf, neatly arranged but over-crowded.Some history, mostly the same as Steve’s, but more novels, lots of novels.Used science fiction paperbacks with broken spines.A bound volume of Captain America comics.A lot of Zane Grey, some romance novels with covers that made Steve blush.Collected Dylan Thomas, Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.

 

**Bucky**

Steve’s on edge, and why wouldn’t he be.( _watch him, they’re bringing the sedative_ )  The last time ( _first time, every time_ ) they were this close, Steve got his face ( _hands, nose, teeth_ ) broken.Shoulder still aches ( _cauterize it_ ) sometimes ( _always_ ) when he thinks about it too much ( _so far_ ).  

Steve does that thing ( _nervous, Stevie?_ ), looks up and back down when he’s trying to get away from something ( _you don’t have to_ ) even though he’s older, so much older ( _is it permanent?_ ), and then there’s no going back.( _as if there ever was_ )

“I missed you.”

 

**Steve**

Steve said it before he could stop himself, and knew as soon as he did that it was the wrong thing to say.

Bucky held his eye, more challenge than wariness this time.Head tilted down like he used to when Steve was a foot shorter and he had to do it to look Steve in the eye, but something else now.“Yeah,” Bucky said finally.“I know.”

“You know me.”It came out less of a question than Steve intended it to, because he couldn’t bear the chance of there being more than one possible answer.

Bucky looked down and back up, mouth twisted around something, bitter around the edges and trying not to show it.“‘Course, Rogers.Guess I didn’t take all the dumb with me after all.Course I know you.”

Steve huffed a breath, then another.Tried to make it a laugh but his body wouldn’t cooperate.He swallowed and took another breath and thought he had it under control until it all blew out of him in a half sob, then that was it.Of all the ways this could have gone, this was the one he hadn’t dared hoped for, Bucky passing for sane, whole and normal.With a life, of all things, in Albany, which might as well have been Mars for as unfamiliar as it was, and the floor tilted under him before he realized Bucky stepped in to put an arm around him.

He cried into Bucky’s shoulder and wished that he was a foot shorter and ten stone lighter, wished that he could take all of it back just to have this be the same Bucky that held him when he was mourning his mother and not the man standing right in front of him.And hated himself for the sudden rush of grief, because Bucky standing there, Bucky with his arms around Steve’s shoulders with one hand in his hair was everything he could have asked for.

So Steve kissed him.Stupid, sloppy, face still wet, ungraceful as their first time and Bucky just as stiff and surprised.But worth it, for the way Bucky eased after a second, for the way he smelled, for the most real proof that they were both alive despite everything.

Bucky pulled back first, with something Steve wanted to call the shadow of a smile on his face.“Christ, Rogers, at least take a fella dancing first.”

“Sorry—I’m sorry, I—“

“Steve.It’s fine,” Bucky said, and Steve had a hot flash of vertigo as the metal hand tightened on his arm.Bucky’s mannerisms and gestures were all the same, just harder, stiffer, less easy than they had been.Rusty.“It was just—fuck—sudden, is all.”Or maybe it was Steve that was rusty.

Steve took a deep breath, made himself stand straight.Scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.He let Bucky herd him to the edge of the bed, for lack of anywhere else to sit.Wiped his eyes again when Bucky sat to his right, carefully not touching, hands on knees.Metal shoulder between them, even covered as it was in Bucky’s sweatshirt.

“Why Albany?” Steve asked, to keep himself from doing something stupid again.

Bucky gave him a half shrug.“Close enough to the city, but not too close.”For what, he didn’t say, and Steve didn’t particularly want to know, afraid it would hurt too much.He couldn’t not look at Bucky’s metal hand, held loosely in his other, both resting between his knees.

Bucky caught him looking, Steve saw the flicker of eyes sideways as Bucky glanced at him and followed his look.Slowly, so slowly, Bucky turned his hand over and held it between them.

Steve took Bucky’s hand in his, rubbing his thumb over the cool palm, running finger tips over the ridges where plates met.Heavier than it should have been, with some kind of sensation from the way Bucky curled fingers around Steve’s touch.He turned Bucky’s hand over in his, and looked up to see Bucky watching him.

Bucky leaned into him this time, hesitant with eyes flicking between Steve’s eyes and his mouth.Steve closed the distance between them, and it was better, more like their last time and less like their first, with one of Bucky’s hands in his and Bucky’s other on his knee.Bucky pushed into him, just one side of hesitant, and Steve pushed back, for every time he’d thought about this in the four years since losing, finding, and losing Bucky.  

He wanted to memorize every second of it, hang on to and catalog every way Bucky’s mouth pressed against his, name it and remember it and make it real, but his mind kept slipping past it, too dazed to focus on anything except the weight of Bucky’s hand on his knee and the way his fingers tightened in Steve’s.It was Bucky that pulled him down to the mattress, metal fingers coming up to twist in Steve’s shirt, more insistent along with his mouth as Steve let himself be pulled down in every way he’d ever wanted.

They fit still fit together, Bucky’s hand coming up to Steve’s hair in that way that made him melt, and Steve found the place where his thumb rested in the hollow of Bucky’s hip just under his belt.Bucky made a soft sound, that vertigo of familiar and unfamiliar wrapped up in it.  

And then Bucky drew back, took a breath as he swallowed and twisted his mouth over something he didn’t want to say.Steve brushed fingers down his jaw.“Steve, I—“ Bucky started, not looking at him.

“We don’t have to do anything, Buck.”Steve took a breath too.He should have kept his hands to himself.He should have asked what Bucky wanted.He should have done a lot of things, but hadn’t thought of any of them with Bucky right there, safe and warm and whole.

“I never.”

Never—“Sure you did, Buck, different girl every weekend,” Steve smiled.Hurt then, still hurt, so much that Steve could hardly think past it.

“They were all nice girls, Rogers,” Bucky smiled back, but without any of it reaching his eyes.Hesitant, slow.Worried?“I never, not with anyone.”

Steve sat up at that, trying and failing to keep his face under control.“You don’t—remember?” he asked, choking on it.Bucky sat up too, gone tense and worried.

“Remember what?” Bucky asked, pulling back and closing off.Distrustful.He pushed himself further away on the bed, getting himself out of arm’s reach, putting distance between them.

“I—us,” Steve blurted.Couldn’t keep himself from saying it, couldn’t have to save his life, and he wished he could have with the utter disgust that flashed over Bucky’s face.

“No.”He set his jaw, shook his head with that challenging look back in his eye.“No.That wasn’t real.”

Steve reached for him, thought better of it, then his hand just hung there between them.Bucky focused too intently on his hand, gone still with the intensity of it.Steve pulled back, rubbing his neck.He was off balance with the whiplash between a Bucky who felt the same, smelled the same, moved his hands on the back of Steve’s neck the same, and this.A Bucky who didn’t know the biggest secret they’d kept for each other.

He hesitated so long Bucky said it again.“It wasn’t real,” Bucky said, sounding like he was trying to convince them both.

“I—yeah, Buck, it—it was.”All of it, Steve would have taken back all of it to not have to watch it, to be the one that made Bucky crumple in on himself.Bucky brought his knees up between them, elbows on knees and head in hands.“You okay?” Steve asked stupidly, off balance.

Bucky took a breath, another.Steve held still, trying to catch a glimpse of Bucky’s expression past his hands without moving.Bucky went motionless, unnaturally still in a way that unnerved Steve more than anything, but his breath was unsteady.An uncanny mix of the old Bucky and the Winter Soldier, and it shook Steve worse than if it had just been one or the other.“I—yeah,” Bucky said eventually, without looking up.“Sorry.I mean, no, but yeah.”Another breath.“I thought I’d—made it up.Christ.Hallucinated it.Fuck, Steve, I’m sorry.I thought I’d imagined it.”

“I—Buck, you got nothing to be sorry for.”

Bucky scrubbed his hands through his hair then, taking another breath.“I—fuck.What the fuck are we doing, Steve?”He looked at Steve and started laughing, and Steve couldn’t help but laughing too, if only to keep himself from crying again. 


	3. Best Ahead

**Bucky**

Two days for the handler to reel Steve back in.  ( _The fuck do you mean you lost visual on him?_ ) Two days of leftover Thai ( _boiled cabbage and beef_ ) and basking in the sound Steve makes when he sighs ( _moans, smiles, sleeps_ ), saving it up for later.  Two days ( _this time_ ) of trying not to wonder how much of this is imaginary.

Either Steve is right and no one will come for them, or the handler will show up in two days.

* * *

**Steve**

Bucky warmed up leftovers and they ate on the bed as the sun went down, Steve hardly eating while Bucky prodded him for details of what Steve’s life since waking up had been like.  That Bucky had seen Steve’s old apartment and known it well enough to make the shot on Fury hung between them unspoken, but Bucky just ate thoughtfully and nudged Steve towards describing TV he’d seen, or describing the bodega near his apartment.  Bucky smiled without that edge of bitterness to it when Steve got going about chunks of things in ice cream, and watched him with that unnatural stillness.

It gave Steve something to do while he tried to figure out what they were doing, and then he didn’t have to think about it when Bucky washed the dishes and tugged him to bed.  Bucky knew what they were doing, and Steve went along with it for the comfort of Bucky tossing their shirts on the floor and wrapping himself against Steve’s back.

They slept like that before, in Brooklyn and in Europe.  He didn’t realize how much he missed it until Bucky nudged him to lie down and pressed his nose between Steve’s shoulder blades.  Bucky wrapped around him, protective and warm even after Steve had gotten too big to be enveloped like that.  Laying on their right sides, the metal arm weighed more, much more than he’d expected it to, and Bucky kept it pulled back, to keep it from resting on Steve.

So he fished for Bucky’s hand, awkward until Bucky let him pull his metal hand forward around Steve’s chest the way they used to.  The fingers of Bucky’s other hand curled into Steve’s waist where it was tucked under them both.  Warm, solid, both his hands flexed against Steve’s waist and chest, pulling him closer as Bucky tucked in behind him.  The metal hand warmed against Steve’s chest, even if he could feel the lines and sharpness of it through his tshirt.

Bucky breathed softly against his back, and Steve could feel the tension in him, Bucky clutching him too tightly, feeling as afraid as Steve was that he wouldn’t be there when he woke up.

Then he squeezed Bucky’s left hand where it curled against his chest, and the breath blew out of Bucky in a huff against Steve’s shoulder.  “Tell me about before,” Bucky said finally, muffled by Steve’s shirt, so Steve did, talking until he woke up and Bucky was still there.

* * *

**Sam**

He pulled up to the building at five forty in the evening two days after Steve went missing, and turned off his phone.  Not the place he’d have guessed for the Winter Soldier’s spider hole, but Natasha knew what she was doing.  Sam just hoped he knew what he was doing.

Fucking Rogers.  A bad idea on so many levels, that had seemed like such a good idea at the time.  Mrs. Wilson had raised a damn fool after all.

A quiet building with no doorman.  Potential for multiple civilian casualties if things got out of hand, though, and maybe that was why Hydra had picked the place.  Far from friendly backup if it got really out of hand.  Sam looked up at the windows overlooking the parking lot and wondered if he’d already been spotted.

He tailgated a woman with groceries to get through the locked front door, and tried not to think about what it said about his life choices that he’d followed Captain fucking America into basically lying for a living.

He didn’t bother being stealthy going up the stairs.  If the Winter Soldier was really there, he’d known as soon as Sam had pulled up, maybe before.  If Barnes was really there, it was no good to anyone to spook him.  The question was what state Steve would be in regardless of what version of James Buchanan Barnes was with him.

So Sam knocked on the door.  The little sounds of normal human movement stopped abruptly, and that told him enough.  He unholstered his gun from where it rested heavily against his chest and took a deep breath.

“Steve?  Bucky?” he called, keeping his voice even and hoping to god that it was really them in there.  “It’s Sam, I’m alone.  I’m gonna open the door now.”

Barnes was quicker, of course he was quicker.  “Bucky—“ Steve started, but didn’t move fast enough.  Sam had a brief flash of Barnes uncoiling from beside Steve, coming up with a pistol of his own in hand and putting himself squarely between Sam and Steve.  Barnes had cut his hair to match the Smithsonian, but the look on his face was pure Winter Soldier, and Sam’s gun wavered even as he brought it up.

Steve stayed motionless, still sitting where they’d obviously been in bed together, both of them bed rumpled and in pajamas at that hour of day.  Fucking Rogers, not an ounce of sense in him.

“You don’t have to,” Steve said in the silence, and Sam couldn’t tell if that was for him or Barnes.  “Bucky, Sam, put it down.”

Barnes didn’t look like he registered that at all.  His face was set, anger and tension radiating off him and Sam was sure that the only thing keeping him alive was Steve.

“Him first,” Sam managed past the fear threatening to close his own throat, eyes still on Barnes.  He’d put a vest on, but that wouldn’t stop a head shot.  “Tell him to put it down.”

Steve took a breath and Sam wished he knew what that meant.  “Bucky,” Steve said after too long.  “Put the gun down.  Sam’s a friend.  It’s okay.”

Barnes’ mouth twisted but he didn’t look away or move.  “I’m not gonna hurt anyone, man,” Sam said.  Surprised himself with the steadiness of his own voice.

Barnes looked from Sam to Steve and back again.

“Please, Buck.  It’s okay,” Steve said, and Barnes finally moved to put the gun on the desk.  Slow and deliberate, eyes on Sam the whole time.

Barnes straightened with his hands up and a surly look on his face, still between Sam and Steve, still within arm’s reach of the gun and god knew what else if he decided to make a move, and Sam hadn’t signed up for any of this shit.

But of course he had, when he’d taken up with Rogers, and he’d known it then.

“Sam,” Steve said.  “You didn’t have to come after me.  We’re fine.  Bucky’s fine.”

“You didn’t answer your phone for two days, what the hell was I supposed to think?  Your phone was on its way to a dump in Jersey!”

Barnes glanced at Steve, hands still up.  He made sure that Steve saw it, Sam could tell, Barnes looking away as soon as Steve was aware of his look.  Too deliberate for Sam’s liking, Barnes’ look at Steve calculated, somewhere between drug-seeking looking for a fill and building walls between Steve and everyone else.  “Sorry,” Barnes said, not sounding like he meant it at all.  Sam wasn’t sure what he expected Barnes to sound like, but he sounded normal, insouciant even.

Steve didn’t notice it, oblivious.  He just shook his head, that dazed look on his face. “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a phone.”

“Meant about it ending up in Jersey.”  _That_ was unexpected.  Steve’d said Barnes was funny, but it didn’t look like Steve expected it either, the set up for a joke at a time like this and Barnes’ half smile when he saw they’d gotten it.  Sam revised his assessment, uneasy with a Barnes who clearly wasn’t all together, but had it together enough to manipulate and work the emotional angle.  

“You can put it down, Sam,” Steve said gently then, standing and holding out his hand for the gun like Barnes wasn’t the only unstable one in the room.  Which, ok, Barnes was the steadiest of the three of them but that was weird itself, his unnatural stillness and the way he just didn’t startle.  Sam blew out a long breath and holstered the gun with shaking hands.

“How’d you find us?” Steve asked.  Still gentle.  Sam couldn’t tell if Rogers was trying not to startle him or Barnes.

“Natasha gave me an address.  I told her to hold off on the big guns.”

“Shit,” Steve breathed, rubbing a hand over his face.  Barnes frowned, whether at Steve’s curse or the mention of Natasha, Sam couldn’t tell.  Kept his hands in the air, which Sam wanted to tell him to drop, but the whole situation was still so unstable.

“I know, man, but what the hell did you want me to do?  How was I supposed to know you were—what—on a damn bed and breakfast retreat?”

Steve shook his head.  “Let’s just—Buck, you can put your hands down, it’s okay.  Let’s just sit down and figure this out.”

Barnes settled himself on the edge of the bed, obedient but with that look still on his face.  Steve perched next to him, agitated and trying not to look it, and Sam pulled the desk chair out, very conscious of Barnes’ gun still sitting on the desk.

“You have to check in,” Sam said when Steve opened his mouth and looked mulish.  “Everyone lost their shit when your phone went dark.  I talked them out of busting in here, but people are worried about you, Rogers.”

“Fine,” Steve said, frowning.  “Tell them I’m alive when you get back to the city.”

“I’m not leaving you here, Rogers,” Sam said, and hated that he had to say it in front of Barnes, but it had to be said.

“I’m not leaving,” Steve said, as if Sam hadn’t known that already.  They looked at each other, and all five months of Steve’s pig headedness told him he wouldn’t pry Rogers and Barnes apart with a crowbar.

“Tell them yourself when you come back with me,” Sam said, because figuring out what to do with the Winter Soldier, even a Winter Soldier who jumped in bed with Rogers and made jokes about Jersey, was way above his pay grade.

Steve looked at Barnes then, and sighed when Barnes wouldn’t take his eyes off Sam.  “It’s too late for anyone to drive back tonight,” Steve said finally, putting a hand on Barnes’ knee.  “Buck, is it okay if—Sam, why don’t you stay the night, and we’ll figure it out.”  Steve squeezed Barnes’ knee, consciously or unconsciously, Sam couldn’t tell, and Barnes finally looked away to put his hand on Steve’s, some of the tension draining out of him.  

Sam nodded finally, because there was no getting Steve out of there without Barnes, and there was no getting Barnes out of there without convincing or fire power.  He’d turn his phone back on and text Natasha that they were all alive, at least.

“Fine,” Barnes said.  Hadn’t said a word about what happened, waiting for Steve to make the decision.  “I’ll start dinner.”  He shrugged Steve’s hands off as he stood, Sam trying not to look too tense as he moved.  Either Barnes was as stable as Steve said he was and it would be fine, or he wasn’t and there wasn’t much Sam could do about it.

“Since when do you cook?” Steve asked, looking pleased despite the situation.

“Therapist said it would help,” Barnes said as he moved to the kitchen without looking at them.  Deliberate, slow, staying as far away from Sam as possible.

“Therapist?” Steve asked, glancing at Sam to make sure he’d caught it.  Not that Sam wasn’t surprised too, but he still wondered how much of this was a show, and Steve sounded too hopeful for his own good.  Barnes was painfully, deliberately performing normal, for himself or for Steve, and neither were good options.

“Yeah,” Barnes said flatly.  “You should try it sometime, Steve.  She said get a hobby, have some control.”  Control over what, he didn’t say.  Sam had two guesses, neither of them pleasant.  “Or you not want me near knives,” Barnes said, not hesitating as he pulled down a pot and filled it with water.

That wasn’t a question, and all three of them knew it.  Steve exchanged a look with Sam, both of them breaking it quickly to pretend they hadn’t done it.  “You want a hand, Buck?” Steve said instead.

“There’s beer in the fridge if you want it,” was all Barnes said in response.

Sam pushed himself up, going along with this.  Of the two of them, Barnes was obviously wariest of him.  Couldn’t hurt to take this as a show of faith, or the trust fall it was intended as.  Of all the ways they’d planned for this to go, dinner party at the Winter Soldier’s cute little studio apartment was not one of them and he owed it to Steve to be wary of just how much Hydra a painfully normal Barnes had shaken off.

“You want a beer too?” Sam asked Barnes, pulling two bottles from the fridge for himself and Steve.  Might as well play along even if Steve would make that hang dog face when he missed something that was sitting right in front of him.

“Don’t drink,” Barnes said without turning from where he carefully chopped garlic, and Sam was painfully aware of being in a tiny room with the Winter Soldier holding a knife.  Tactical retreat, then, to think about what it meant for a man who didn’t drink to buy beer for a man who couldn’t get drunk.


	4. I'm Almost Dead But I'm Almost Clean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for alcohol, referenced noncon and suicidal ideation. Coulson is not very nice in this.

**Bucky**

Steve breathes softly beside him, asleep.The handler is by the window, on watch.  

( _Why don’t you make him take watch? Not like he fuckin sleeps anyway.Because_ he’s _what you’re on watch for, dumbass, make sure he doesn’t murder us both in our sleep._ )

Steve and his handler are on edge and skittish, arguing over him and his failures in tones he’s not meant to over hear, what to do about him.Steve finally agrees to take the first watch when Wilson argues that if Shield could find them, Hydra could too. 

( _as if there had ever been a difference between the two_ )

He wonders if Steve actually believes it, because Wilson sure doesn’t.

He takes a breath, deep and then shallow, shifting so the new handler knows he’s awake, won’t startle.Sits up, slow, ( _careful, steady, steady, Stevie_ ), everything so slow these days, swings his legs off the bed.

The soft sound of the safety on the handler’s gun being thumbed off.( _Don’t you_ fucking _move_.)Steve shifts, restless in his sleep in a way he hadn’t been before the handler showed up.

His voice hurts, grates on him to hear it ( _three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight, three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight, three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight, three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight, three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight, three-two-five-five-seven-_ ), but the longer the silence stretches out, the more tense the handler is, coiled up in the corner.“Just taking a piss, Wilson,” he finally says to the darkness, not moving, listening to the handler’s breathing.( _Quiet, be quiet, be fucking still Barnes, just a pull of the trigger, take a breath and pull, goddamnit_.)

“Course, big guy, just don’t trip over Steve’s shoes,” Wilson says finally, a little of the tension draining out of the small room.Barnes ( _or what’s left of the dead man Stevie’s dragged back twice now_ ) stood carefully, stepped around Wilson and Steve’s things carefully, pads to the bathroom and back carefully.Lays back down next to Steve carefully, conscious of the stiff line of Wilson’s shoulders in the dark, even more conscious of the full thirty-two minutes it takes Wilson to quietly thumb the safety of his gun back on.

* * *

 

The handler gives them the next day.Most of a day, anyway, waiting until after breakfast like he’s being polite about it.( _Drink up, soldier._ )Pancakes and oatmeal with apples in both, more bacon than he or Steve had ever dreamed of before 1944.Heavy cream in the coffee, so thick the butterfat separates out.

He’s thought about moving to a place with a bigger kitchen, because cooking is comfortable and controllable, and grocery stores have so many things these days.It’d been the first thing on his list after setting up the shell accounts with Hydra’s money, because god knows if he deserves back pay it’s from those fuckers.Fruit and all those fancy cheeses like there’d been in France.( _What the shit is this, Steve, it’s got mold inside it._ )Three kinds of pastrami and every kind of rye bread.He bought a bottle of whiskey, but Rumlow ruined that, so it sits empty under the kitchen sink with the drain cleaner and the other dirty secrets.His therapist says to focus on the present and self-care, build and protect his routines like sleep and food and boundaries and making good associations.

Barnes wonders what the new handler will have to say about that.Wonders how long he’ll remember or care once the handler takes them in.Hopes he hasn’t gotten the therapist or Steve or anyone else killed for his stupid, misplaced optimism, as if anyone like him and Steve could have normal lives for even a little while.Two days of that sound Steve makes when he sighs will have to be enough, even though twenty years wasn’t enough the first time around.

The handler is all smiles in the morning ( _ready, big guy?_ ), both him and Steve groggy after their half night of watch.Barnes lets the handler make coffee while Steve frets on the edges of the kitchen, and that’s the beginning his first mistake.

The handler is casual with Steve and wary of Barnes, trying not to look it.Steve hovers between crowding Barnes where he flips pancakes and separating him physically from the handler, and Barnes regrets letting the handler find them the night before but he didn’t know what else to do ( _like you ever did, Barnes_ ).Shield would have found out sooner or later, but it makes him more anxious waiting for the extraction, wondering how it’ll go for Steve when they’re returned.

It’s comfortable.Sordidly, horribly comfortable.The handler is comfortable, like Rumlow in his better moods, funny and easy to be ordered by.Barnes wants to like him and hates himself for it.Steve likes him, and Steve is a terrible judge of people.( _Look at you, Barnes._ )

Wilson’s body language is open and he telegraphs his moves, sure of his control of Steve, less sure of his control of Barnes but not asserting it yet.( _You can’t leave me alone with_ —that)He takes up space in a way that leaves no room for argument but he’s careful of where he puts his hands, and it’s easy to pretend this will be fine.( _calm down calm down calm the fuck down calm down_ )He wouldn’t be so bad if Rumlow hadn’t been the same in the beginning.Steve isn’t wary of him, so Barnes is resigned to it when Steve steps out to take a shower after they eat.

“It’s good to hear you’ve been seeing a therapist, man,” the handler says, drying as Barnes washes the dinner dishes and stacks them in the little drying rack.( _quiet_ )Wilson puts things away like he already knows where everything is, but it’s not like there’s anything left to hide from him.“Steve was pretty worried about you after DC but it looks like you had your shit together.”

“What do you want?”It’s too aggressive, but he’d rather get it over with and get it out in the open, not pretending like they didn’t both know what’s coming.If he’ll pay for it later, it’ll be worth cutting through Wilson’s bullshit early.

The handler is unshakeable, just raising an eyebrow at him.“I—nothing, man, just making conversation.That was some heavy shit that happened to you, you deserve the space to get through it.Finding a therapist you trust is a big step, you should be proud of yourself.”

There’s silence for a while, halfway comfortable if Barnes wasn’t trying to will Steve out of the shower faster and trying desperately to look like he’s not shying away from Wilson’s hand brushing his over the drying rack.He thinks maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to give the handler something to take away, but there’s no winning if they want him pretending at normal for the time being.( _Head up, shoulders back.Smile.Make eye contact._ )It hadn’t been pretending until the handler showed up, until he’d gotten thrown off balance between protecting Steve and protecting himself.And he’s made the mistake of thinking that this could be salvaged because the handler is so comfortable.( _In for another round, soldier?_ )Made the mistake of hoping for something.

“Look, I don’t want to pry, but—are you okay with this?” the handler asks.“Steve, I mean?You and him—you’re not—feeling pushed into anything?”

Barnes clenches his jaw and keeps his eyes on the dish water, because there it is.Finally.“What do you want?” he asks again, because maybe the handler’ll come out with it this time.

The handler takes a breath.( _Breath, Rogers, almost there._ )“I know you and Steve—have a lot of time to make up for.And that’s okay.I don’t want to get in the way of that.It’s just—you don’t have to if you’re not ready for it.Steve would wait for you if you need to slow down or deal with things first.”

* * *

**Sam**

Sam made himself say it, because someone had to give Barnes a heads up and put the brakes on things, and Steve sure wasn’t going to.God love Steve Rogers, because he didn’t have the sense fill a teacup.“Look, man, I don’t know how to say this,” Sam started, “but you should know—there was a file about what they did to you.”

“There were a lot of files about that,” Barnes said, sounding suddenly tired and deflated, finally looking as young as he was supposed to be.The whiplash at this stage always gave Same headaches and made his heart hurt.Steve was under thirty despite his years on ice, and Barnes was only a year or two older, depending on how his years in the cold counted.Both of them around twenty-six last time they had anything approaching normal.

Sam took a deep breath and made himself not varnish it.“I know, man, I know.But there was one in particular, Steve didn’t see it.Your last—“ Fuck, what to call Rumlow.Sam wished that asshole had died instead of getting picked up by Shield, because there was no way he’d get everything he deserves so long as he’s in custody.Handler seemed too kind, team put a neutral spin on it, anything else might be triggering.Barnes seemed stable, but it was bad enough for Sam to spring this on him in the middle of washing dishes.Cop out with passive voice, then.“There were some files that said you’d been sexually assaulted.”Rumlow got caught making a cell phone video of himself raping the Winter Soldier, more like.Sam watched Barnes for a reaction, but Barnes’ hands just tightened on the sponge, which was reasonable enough given Sam had a gun pointed at him twenty four hours ago.

Reasonable enough, until Barnes dropped the sponge and took a step towards Sam with that look on his face.“Give it to me.”

Sam took a step back, and found himself backed against the fridge with only a damp dish rag between him and the Winter Soldier.“I don’t have it, man.I don’t—the file’s destroyed, no one’s got it.”Sam had destroyed it against his own better judgement, not sure Steve would be able to handle it and uneasy with the suggestion that Rumlow hadn’t been the first to get that particular bright idea.

Barnes put his metal hand on the fridge next to Sam’s head and flexed it, all the little plates and gears of it whirring right next to his eye.That was pure calculation, working the emotional angle because Barnes knew the metal arm thing spooked him.“You’re not going to tell Steve,” Barnes said.

“I—no,” Sam stumbled, because yeah, the thought had occurred to him to tell Steve, but it hadn’t seemed right even when they didn’t know what condition they’d find Barnes in.“Fuck no, of course I wouldn’t tell Steve.No, that’s yours to tell, I’d never.I just—you and Steve like this, I thought you should know it might be out there somewhere,” Sam babbled, trying to will Steve out of the shower faster. Because no, Barnes hadn’t exactly threatened him yet and Sam knew what he was getting into with rattling a rattled vet, but it’s something else when there’s a metal fucking arm a couple inches from his windpipe.Sam took a deep breath.“If you want some space, Steve and I can wait to go back to the city until you’ve had a chance to talk to your therapist.”

Then the shower finally clicked off and Barnes took his hand away and went back to washing dishes like none of it happened, except for the ugly twist of his mouth as he pointedly avoided looking at Sam.Sam spent the next few hours letting Steve make plans to move Barnes down to the city, and by the time he realized what was going on it was too late.

* * *

**Bucky**

Wilson knows all about him, so it’s no surprise that he calls in the extraction team.

He notices it before Steve, because Steve still only notices trouble when he’s got a mind to get into it.Wilson must have called it in before breakfast.They’re evacuating the civilians from the surrounding apartments and buildings, taking precautions in case things get messy and they don’t want witnesses.It’s slow and careful, but he can’t not notice the comforting thrum of the neighborhood start to go dead.

Barnes stays barefoot in flannel pajama bottoms and a tshirt even after Steve and Wilson get dressed, letting Steve smile indulgently at his laziness.Steve can look dignified and indignant for both of them when it happens; Barnes minimizes the appearance of threat and sits with his hands on his knees until a man Barnes recognizes from a file walks in the door without knocking.There’s a strike team at all the windows before Steve even stands, sputtering indignantly.The handler doesn’t bother looking surprised.

Natalia is at the door right behind Coulson, the real threat in the room backing up Coulson’s orders before he even gives them, looking unhappy about it.There isn’t room for anyone else in the little studio, a tac team on standby in the hallway but not able to fit in with Coulson, Natalia, Steve and the handler already in there.Part of the reason he’d chosen it.The other part was the windows, and he glances out past the team hanging from the roof to get a last look at the sunshine.Doesn’t look too long, in case they think he’s looking for an escape route.

“Stand down, Rogers,” Coulson says evenly, like Steve is the real threat here.That’s a little comforting at least, that they’re not entirely sure of their control over Steve.“This can go the easy way, and no one wants it to go the hard way.”Hill is audible somewhere down at street level, monitoring the sniper team across the street.Barnes can see Steve’s jaw work, looking around the room and settling on the handler.

Wilson stands slowly, hands out more for Steve than the Strike team.“Don’t look at me like that.I told you I didn’t call anyone in.”

“He didn’t have to,” Natalia says, looking pointedly at Barnes where he sits on the couch, holding perfectly still.A little too still, maybe, the part of him that’s more aware of those things now says.But there’s no right way for him to be; too still and he’s the Winter Soldier; too normal and he’s faking it; too agitated and he’s a threat.  

“He’s not a threat,” Steve says, not doing quite a good enough job keeping the anger out of his voice.“We’re fine.”Barnes does his best to show that Steve’s right, even though he knows there’s only one way this is going to go.

“He’s killed people, Steve,” Natalia says.Same flat tone as Coulson, no matter how unhappy she looks past the hard front she puts on for everyone else.She’s older now too.He’d missed her once.And once he hadn’t missed her at all.

“So have I,” Steve starts.“So have you—“

“Civilians, Captain,” Coulson interrupts.“Planned and premeditated.Executions.”

“They were Hydra—“ Steve starts, but Barnes can hear him falter, trail off unconvinced.There’s a reason Steve was always the face of it all, and Barnes was his unsavory shadow off stage.“After everything—“

Coulson cuts him off.“Captain Rogers.Neither you nor Barnes get to make that call.You did away with Insight yourself.Either Barnes is as sane as you think he is, which makes him fully responsible for every one of those murders, or he wasn’t in control of himself and he’s dangerous to everyone around him.There are no other options,” Coulson says, and there’s no arguing with that.

“I’ll go.Steve, I’ll go,” Barnes says, because Steve has never known how to walk away from a fight.He looks for permission from Wilson and Coulson.“But I have to call my therapist,” he says, and tries not to make it sound too much like the begging that it is.“She’ll call the cops if I don’t show for appointments.”He hopes she doesn’t end up dead for this.She agreed to call it in, when the worst they’d thought could happen was him losing himself or being picked up for Hydra.This is worse, but he’s not sure how much yet.

“No,” Coulson snaps, and that’s how it’s going to go.Barnes stays still, hands on his knees and eyes on his hands.At least this is familiar.“No contact.”

Steve tries to argue it, but his handler is talking him down already as Barnes lets Natalia haul him to his feet.He makes easy, small movements, being cooperative, Natalia putting herself between Barnes and Steve.Barnes lets himself be herded out the door without looking back.Easier for everyone that way.

“Director Coulson, sir, this isn’t a good idea—“ Wilson starts as he’s hurried down the stairs.“You can’t just cut off contact with the therapist—“ and then they’re too far out of range for even Barnes to hear.

He thinks maybe he should regret this, getting found or losing Steve or even just the neat little stack of books he’d bought but not read yet, but it was never going to last, so he doesn’t.No use regretting something that should never have been in the first place.He’s tracked down everyone involved in the waking nightmare, so there’s nothing left for him besides Steve until it starts again.

There’s a van outside and it’s—one of Hydra’s.Repainted, but the interior is the same, restraints made for him.Made for Steve.Same difference, whether the van is Shield’s or Hydra’s now.They pack him in as quickly as possible, followed by a full tac team in masks and protective gear, but he can still hear Steve protesting as the doors shut behind them, for all the good it does either of them.

* * *

It doesn’t go the way he expects it to go, because he expects a bullet to the back of the head as soon as Steve is out of sight.  Or maybe just hopes for it.  

 


	5. Plenty of Years, Plenty of Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion of suicidal thoughts, attempted self harm and disordered eating in this chapter. Bucky's not very nice to Steve either.

**Steve**

“You can’t _do_ this!”Steve threw open Coulson’s door, Shield security trailing him.“He’s a citizen and a veteran, you can’t do this.”  Coulson's office was obscene, nondescript, generic and bare on one of the lower floors of Stark Tower.  Steve refused to call it the other thing so long as it was being used for this.

“Captain Rogers,” Coulson said, waving away the security without looking up from his desk.He finished what he was writing as the door clicked closed and looked up at Steve with a thin smile.“Have a seat, please.”

Steve stood in front of the desk, willing himself steady.  “I’m leaving and I’m taking Bucky with me.He’s sane and stable, you got what you wanted.Now let him have his life back.”

Coulson half turned to his computer and clicked something.Bucky’s voice, distorted and mechanized, came out of it, and Steve expected some live feed from his debriefing in progress, until the shock of it caught up with him.

_I—yeah.Sorry.I mean, no, but yeah.I thought I’d—made it up.Christ.Hallucinated it.Fuck, Steve, I’m sorry.I thought I’d imagined it._

“What is that?" Steve demanded.  "Where did you get that?”They’d bugged Bucky’s apartment.They’d known where he was all along and had just been waiting to pull him back in.Shield was no better than Hydra.Bucky was right.

Coulson gave him that goddamn apologetic smile again.“We took . . . certain precautions when you were hospitalized after the last encounter with Barnes,” Coulson said.He sounded halfway sorry about it, and Steve might have bought it if not for what came next.“Shield activated the transmitting recorder in your molar when your phone went dark.”

“You—you put—you put a _recording device_ in my _teeth_?” Steve demanded.They hadn’t had to find Bucky at all.Steve had led them right to him.Bucky was right.

“Tooth,” Coulson corrected with that apologetic little half smile.“It was activated only after careful consideration for your safety, and it’s been deactivated since your extraction.Your communications with Barnes were’t checked until after you’d gone missing.”

“You’ve—you’re—“ Steve sputtered.“I’m taking Bucky.I’m taking him, whether Shield cooperates or not.”He turned to go, ready to burn the building down if he had to.Natasha would make it out on her own.

“Where would you go, Captain?” Coulson asked quietly.“The Bureau and Justice are both looking for Barnes.Do you seriously think it would be safer for him or for anyone else if he was in federal custody?”

Steve stopped shy of the doorway.Hands balled at his side to keep from throttling Coulson.“He shouldn’t be in anyone’s custody,” Steve said without turning.

“After Sergeant Barnes pulled you out of the Potomac, he killed forty-seven people.Six of them after he sent you that photo from Times Square.Some of them federal agents and foreign nationals.Doctors.Police.Pharmacy technicians.Professors.No defensive wounds, nothing to suggest self-defense,” Coulson was implacable, his tone gentle but unrelenting and Steve was glad he hadn’t turned around, to keep his face from betraying him.“Even if every single one of them were Hydra, they were all extra-judicial executions after you say he broke their programming.Now he tells you he can’t differentiate between reality and hallucinations.I think you can appreciate our reluctance to see him roaming freely just yet.”

Steve did turn then, and hated himself for listening.“Seventy years, Coulson.He was tortured for seventy years while God and the United States government let it happen, and the only thing he forgot was the last time someone cared about him.I’m not letting you do it to him all over again.”

“No one’s going to hurt him, Captain,” Coulson said, and Steve could maybe buy that his regret meant something for the first time, because it didn’t come with a smile.“He’s here and not on his way to federal custody for a reason.Help Shield help him, and you can both go home sooner.”

Steve finally left, without the threats and bluster, which had always been just empty air because he’d always failed Bucky more than anyone else.But forty-seven people.Steve had wanted to do the same and more, beat them until their mothers wouldn’t recognize them and then make them beg for death, but Bucky had beaten him to it.Made sure that each one recognized him, and put a single bullet between their eyes.Forty-seven of them.It was kinder, almost, and Bucky was more in control of himself for those five months after DC than Steve was.One of them should have been in a cage, and it wasn’t Bucky.

He told himself that it couldn’t hurt.That Coulson wasn’t right, but he wasn’t wrong either, and it couldn’t hurt to let Bucky talk to their psychologists since Bucky was fine.

But forty-seven people.

* * *

They had him in the basement, and it made Steve’s blood boil to know that Stark Tower had been built from the foundations up with the possibility in mind.  For Bucky, for Steve, for Bruce, it didn’t matter.  That it existed at all was bad enough.  Built right into the foundation of this new order Stark wanted to make.

Bucky sat on the floor facing the single door, his back to the slab bed with his knees drawn up.Steve’s step faltered when he realized it was the only place in that curved glass coffin where Bucky wouldn’t be visible from at least one angle.The rest of the round glass space was visible from every angle, and when Bucky looked up at him, the harsh white light made his face gaunter, more hollow than it had looked in the soft grey light of the Albany apartment.Could have been two different men, the one kept under glass and hard light like a specimen and the one who wore fleece hiking jackets and kept a pile of used paperbacks next to the bed.It gave Steve vertigo, thinking about which was the real one.

Bucky tracked him coming closer to the glass, but it had to have been distorted by the light and the curve of the glass: harsh light inside, dark outside, to keep him from seeing movement outside the glass cell clearly.Like an aquarium.

They’d taken Bucky’s clothes and given him something like hospital scrubs, but thinner.Institutional.Institutionalized.The pants fit fine, but Bucky swam in the shirt, two sizes too big in the waist in order to fit over the metal shoulder.Otherwise he didn’t have a mark on him or a hair out of place since he’d been pulled out of the apartment five hours previous.

Steve stood at the glass, at a loss for what to say.Intensely conscious of the guards standing in the shadows, of the cameras that had to have been installed along with the cell, of the goddamn recording device in his own mouth.Bucky just looked at him, and Steve wished that there was some kind of anger or betrayal in his face, but Bucky just looked at him blankly.Not even resigned, just blank.Like none of it had been real.

“Hey Buck,” Steve said finally, swallowing away his discomfort.He stood with his hands in his pockets to keep himself from fidgeting.“You okay?”Bucky just gave him that look, and at least that was a little flash of personality.“It’ll be okay, Buck, I promise.I’ll get you out of here.”

Bucky’s jaw worked at that, mouth twisting with that expression that used to mean _you’re such a dumbshit but I love you anyway_ , except this time there wasn’t any love in it, just the tilt of Bucky’s jaw up and away so he could look at Steve through his lashes, the familiarity and unfamiliarity of it all at once shocking.“It’s not okay, Steve,” Bucky said finally.“It hasn’t been okay since nineteen forty-fucking-two.It’s not okay and it’s not going to be okay ever again.”

“No one’s going hurt you, I won’t let them—“

Bucky laughed, short and brittle, cutting him off.That was familiar, that was the Bucky Steve remembered rescuing from Zola, bitter at the world.And then Bucky looked at him, really looked at him for the first time since since Steve handed him over.And it wasn’t sadness in his eyes, but maybe something like he wished it could still be sadness for Steve’s sake.Or maybe it was just Steve wishing for it.“Don’t you get it, Steve?Of course Shield wouldn’t hurt me; Shield did this to me.”

“Bucky, Hydra’s not—“

“C’mon, Steve,” Bucky interrupted, his voice sharper than Steve remembered.The first time he’d interrupted Steve since whisking him out of Brooklyn, the first time he’d shown a flash of aggression towards Steve.Steve frowned before thinking better of it, the look that had flashed across Bucky’s face nothing like him.

( _because it wasn’t_ )

“You were Hydra’s asset just as much as I was; maybe more,” Bucky said.“You put the good face on it.You don’t think Shield knew just as much about me as Hydra knew about you?They’re two sides of the same coin.We’re two sides of the same coin, pal, always have been.You saw my file, Rogers.”

Steve swallowed, angry at the world and not willing to show it in front of Bucky, in front of Coulson, in front of anyone else who might be watching.“You know I did.”

“I saw your file too,” Bucky said.“All of it.You know how?Because Hydra is Shield and Shield is Hydra, and they both put you through the ringer as soon as you were out of the ice.”

“There isn’t any Shield any more,” Steve said weakly, for lack of a better response, because there wasn’t one.It was true, and Bucky was the only one between the two of them with the stomach to admit it.

That laugh again.“Great.So this is something new and better.”He gave Steve that slanted look.“It’s always the same, pal.”

Steve folded in on himself, sitting on the floor to mirror Bucky across the glass.There wasn’t any answer for that, because Bucky was right, and there wasn’t anything Steve could do about it or to convince Bucky otherwise.

“You know how long it takes a man to starve to death, Steve?” Bucky asked in the quiet.

Steve looked up at Bucky from where he’d been twisting his hands together, useless.“You know they can hear us,” Steve said.

“Yeah, I know.I don’t care,” Bucky said, with a look straight up at where Steve supposed he’d found a camera.Looked back at Steve.“It’s supposed to be three weeks, but I made it to five.Out for long-term recon and no one thought to notice.Nineteen sixty-eight.I remember the year because they kept me out for most of it after to put the muscle back on.How long d’you think they’ll let me go this time?Before they put a tube down my nose, I mean?” Bucky asked, chin tilted to look at him through slanted eyes in the way that was familiar and so heartbreakingly not.“It’s all I thought about, when I came back to myself long enough to think about anything.”

The conversation has gone wildly out of control, Steve’s heart hammering in his ears as he heard himself say it, even though he didn’t want to hear the answer, didn’t want Coulson to hear the answer.“What, Buck?”

“How to end it.What it would take.Tried to pull the trigger once in the eighties, but I was too much of a coward for it.You were always the brave one.”

Steve was a coward.He put his face in his hands and couldn’t look Bucky in the face because he didn’t want to hear it.He’d put the plane down in the ocean because he couldn’t face going back to a New York without a James Barnes in it and he put his face in his hands sitting on the floor of Tony Stark’s basement because he couldn’t make himself face a world where Bucky had tried to kill himself because of Steve’s cowardice.

“I don’t feel guilty for any of it, Steve,” Bucky said after a while.

Steve took a deep breath and didn’t ask what Bucky meant because he didn’t want to know.Still couldn’t look at him.“It’s not your fault, you shouldn’t have to.They made you do things you never would have done.”

“I don’t mean those,” Bucky said, and that was it, that was the nail in the coffin Coulson was looking for and Bucky handed it right over, knowing they were listening.“D’you know why I don’t feel bad about it?” Bucky asked, and then stayed quiet for so long Steve had to look at him.Bucky met his eyes and Steve recognized him, that flat bitterness when he’d pulled Bucky back from Zola’s lab the first time.“Because I never felt bad about it.Not in 1945, not in 1942, not in 1935.Hydra didn’t have to make a monster because they already had one.I can’t remember my mother’s face but I remember beating Francis McGillicuddy to death because he stole your groceries.You didn’t know about that, did you?”

Steve closed his eyes.Made himself open his eyes and look at Bucky when he said it.“Yeah, Buck, I did.”He hadn’t known it, but he’d figured it, and McGillicuddy had had it coming to him, for more reasons than just groceries.Steve had hoped then that it wasn’t an accident.

Bucky chewed on that, his mouth twisting unhappily the way it did when he was trying to figure out how to say something he couldn’t not say.“Well.More fool you, then,” he said finally, and then went silent until Natasha came to pull Steve out.Coulson wanted to talk, she said.

* * *

Steve left him there, because he was a coward, and because he was scared.  Bucky looked progressively more and more like the Winter Soldier the longer they kept him, and it killed Steve.  Killed him even more seeing a man with Bucky’s face move less and less like him, more and more like a feral animal wound tight in a cage growing progressively too small, proving Coulson right.


	6. I'm Not the Man I Wished For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably going to end up a couple more than eight chapters, but I'm not sure how many more yet.

**Sam**

When it became clear that it wasn’t going to be just an observation, he called Natasha.He had to wait for Steve to go see Barnes to get two minutes without the big guy pacing the apartment, but she did actually answer.

“You’re calling about Barnes,” she said before he’d even realized she’d picked up.

“Come on, Natasha, it’s killing Steve.You have to do something.”

Silence on the other end of the phone.“What do you think I’m doing?If you can’t see electricity, does that mean it’s not working?”Sam got up to pace Steve’s little brownstone apartment.Barnes and him both preferred small spaces, and Sam just didn’t get it.

“I just—talk to Coulson about the therapist,” Sam said into the phone.“Please?This isn’t right, you know Shield’s doing more harm than good.”

More silence on the other end of the phone.“They have her files.”

“Yeah, I know they have her files, and that’s not right either and you know it.Barnes didn’t give consent for that and they’re treating him like a damn frog vivisection.”  

“You saw the tapes,” Natasha said, and he couldn’t read her tone.Sam wondered how much of it was deliberate, but she mostly sounded tired.Maybe a little bored.Enough unlike her usual flipness that it made Sam wonder which way she was trying to play him.

“Yeah.Yeah, I saw the tapes,” Sam said after a while.That wasn’t right either, Shield taping Barnes’ “therapy” sessions under glass without consent and showing them to Steve.But Barnes seemed aware that he was being recorded, looking straight up at the camera once in a while as he talked.Performing, but less and less the way he’d been performing when Sam had found him and Steve.Barnes had moved more stiffly at the apartment, and in the tapes he moved with more tight energy, none of the careful control he’d had at the apartment.Pushups, situps, obliques and then a couple hours of sitting motionless on the floor unless Steve or one of the therapists came in.Not quite restlessness.More like he was ready to wait for as long as he had to, and Sam didn’t like to think about what he was waiting for.Barnes at the apartment had been unsettling, with some flashes of normal, but Barnes under glass looked exactly like what they’d worried about finding.Not quite all there.

“I meant the tapes with Rumlow,” Natasha said, voice still flat.“They complicate things.I’ll send you the link for where they leaked.”

Sam makes himself watch pieces before Steve gets back, and it’s worse than he expected.

* * *

**Bucky**

He knows why they do it, but it doesn’t make it any better.He knew exactly why Hydra and Zola did what they did, but that didn’t make any of that any better either, so.

This time it’s eight hours of darkness, one hour of light, then food, debrief for three hours, three hours alone, food, testing for three hours, three hours alone, food, three hours alone, darkness and it starts over like clockwork because it is.It’s so boring he starts to think he preferred Zola and Hydra’s version, light or dark for weeks on end, sudden jarring noise or standing for hours on end.At least that was honest.

The therapist and the debrief are fine.He answers everything they ask him, because why not.He told Hydra everything he knew in the end and it didn’t matter whether he did or not, so there’s no harm in making things easier for Steve.They still seem to want him pretending at normal, and he tells himself that if he’s cooperative it makes Steve come back, even though he doesn’t know if it makes a difference.His old therapist said that attempting to project control over the uncontrollable is an unhealthy coping mechanism, but she’s dead anyway, so what does she know.

The food is the worst.Scrambled eggs, tiny squares of tofu, oatmeal or mashed potatoes on a rice paper tray that starts to go soggy if he doesn’t eat it fast enough.Too soft to hurt anyone with and cut up small so he can’t choke himself, though he thinks if he mashed the tofu or eggs together in a ball he might be able to manage it.Water straight from the tap built into the back of the toilet because they won’t give him a cup, and not much of it at a time because the tap’s been set to shut itself off before he can drown himself.

The clothes are paper or fabric so thin it doesn’t make a difference.They’re soft enough to tear with the slightest movement and practically see through besides, but he lost all sense of dignity and privacy somewhere around 1942 so it doesn’t really matter.Small patches of velcro to close because they don’t want to give him elastic or anything to strangle himself or anyone else with.He mostly doesn’t wear the shirt because pushups are the only thing keeping him from going completely stir crazy and it’s not worth begging for another when it tears.The guards all look the same and don’t care anyway.

Steve is the only variable in the routine, and he can’t tell if that makes things better or worse.( _worse_ )A half-hour or an hour at a time, sometimes after the debrief and sometimes after the therapist.Once or twice right before or after the lights go on or off for the shift.Steve brought a chocolate bar once, a Hershey’s that tasted just as good as it did in 1943 but broken up into little pieces to pass through the tray, and fuck if that hadn’t brought him closer to breaking than anything else.Just like 1943.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the break in routine makes everything else better or worse because it’s not like he can do anything about it anyway.

Steve’s face is how he knows he’s really starting to lose it ( _lost all of it a long time ago, buddy_ ), the day Steve’s eyes flicker down to his left shoulder and then back.He starts putting the shirt on when Steve shows up after that, paper thin and transparent as it is.

Because it’s all spelled out there on his traitorous body, where he can’t keep his right hand from digging into the juncture of metal and skin.The acknowledgement that he knows they’re right but can’t do anything to get rid of it, that there’s something wrong with him he doesn’t know how to fix, fingers of his right hand worrying at the scar tissue in a way he’d never thought to do before.He’s not consciously trying to dig it out but he starts to think maybe he should be, the puckered flesh starting to pull away from the metal the more inflamed it gets until he’s worrying at it because the pain is the only thing he can actually control and the only break in his routine besides Steve and now it hurts all the time like it never did before.He makes himself sit still with hands pinched between his knees for hours on end so that he can’t make it so bad they’ll make him stop.Steve never mentions it, and Barnes hates himself with how grateful he is for that little shred of privacy.

* * *

**Steve**

They didn’t talk much, and less and less as Steve struggled to keep up the positive front.Mostly Steve sat cross legged on the floor next to the glass, Bucky sat against the slab bed as far from Steve as he could, and they talked about old baseball games.Coulson and Hill said to stay away from anything happening outside, and Steve could only manage to listen when Bucky brought up anything after 1945, so it didn’t leave them much else to talk about.They ran out of baseball games pretty soon.

Bucky looked ragged, his clean shave long gone and looking worn with no way to shower.Like Sam had warned Steve they might find him, unsure how much self-care Bucky would be able to manage after seventy years under control, but they hadn’t found him like that, they’d made him like that.He’d stopped making eye contact unless directly asked to.Mostly stopped speaking without being spoken to, but his therapists said he was responsive.

So it startled Steve out of the piece of floor he’d been frowning at when Bucky cleared his throat.“Steve, can I ask you something?” Bucky asked.Voice a little hoarse, glancing up at Steve through the glass and down.Mouth twisted as he looked away, that look he got when he wasn’t sure he wanted to say something.

“Yeah, Buck, anything,” Steve said, twisting from where he’d been sitting.

“D’you think—“ Bucky swallowed, looking up at him and back down.Ducking his head like he was about to get hit even with the glass separating them.“D’you think I could get a pack of cards in here?”He looked back up at Steve, flashing a shadow of his old smile, a half-remembered version of the smile that had gotten them both into and out of all kinds of trouble, but it wasn’t quite right, shot through with the anxiety in the way Bucky held his shoulders and couldn’t quite look Steve in the eye.

Steve closed his eyes and took a deep breath to make himself say it.Coulson and Hill would never allow it.There’d been a three hour meeting about why the Hershey’s bar had been a security breach—no possible outside contact.Too great a possibility of Hydra using Steve to initiate something they couldn’t control.Now they searched Steve’s pockets every time he came to see Bucky.Steve sighed.He had to get them both out of this, but he didn’t know how.“I don’t know, Buck.I’ll try, but I don’t think so.”

Bucky huffed a laugh.Not a real laugh, not an angry laugh, just a quick puff of air trying to pass for one and failing at even sounding fake.“You mean Captain America can parachute thirty miles behind enemy lines but not get a goddamn pack of cards?” Bucky asked, and it was meant to sound like a joke but Steve didn’t miss the bitterness in it, even without looking at Bucky.Couldn’t make himself.“Who you taking orders from these days, Rogers?”

“Things are different, Buck.I’ll see what I can do, but I don’t want to get your hopes up.”He opened his eyes because the light changed.Bucky, silent, standing arm’s length from the glass.He was silent when he moved now, in a way he hadn’t been in Albany, and Steve hated how unnerving he found it.Steve stood, made himself look Bucky in the eye.

“I get it, Steve,” Bucky said.Blinking fast, trying not to tear up with a fake half smile.He swallowed something back and tried to turn up the smile brighter, a carbon copy of the one Steve remembered.Grainy, indistinct around the edges and not quite right.“No toothbrush, no pencils, no bedsheets—I get it.But it’s just a pack of cards.”The smile wasn’t Bucky, but this was, too proud to beg but desperate enough to do it anyway.

Steve put his fingertips on the glass.Hated it.Hated this.Hated lying to Bucky that there was any chance of it.Hated that he couldn’t get Bucky a pack of cards, because if he could have, Bucky wouldn’t have been in there in the first place.“I can’t, Buck.”

“Just cards, Steve, that’s all.Or—Christ, a fucking radio with something on a loop if you think I’m gonna kill someone with a papercut, anything. _Please_ , Steve.”

He was a coward, couldn’t take it.Couldn’t take looking at Bucky.Steve turned away.“I can’t.”

“It’s just _cards_ ,” Bucky snarled, and there was a sudden, sharp sound of metal on glass before the alarm sounded.Steve whipped around in time to catch the rage and fury flicker off Bucky’s face as the guards brought their guns down, red light of the alarm pulsing in the spidering cracks across the glass where Steve’s hand had been.Bucky backed into the center of the cage, crumpling in on himself as he sat heavily, looking to Steve for something.Eyes gone big and empty of the wildness that had been there for a half second.  

“Just cards.Even Hydra let me have cards,” Bucky said, barely audible before the glass room flooded with sedative gas.


	7. A Few Behind

**Steve**

Bucky went to Rumlow first.

Before the selfies, before the texts, before Portland, Bucky went to Rumlow first.

Steve watched the surveillance video ten, a dozen times.Two weeks after the Potomac.A male nurse hurried past the cameras on Rumlow’s hallway, hair shaved close and beard grown out, face casually averted from the security cameras.Powder blue scrubs and orange crocs.  

Bucky.Or Bucky as whoever he’d stolen ID from to check in past the guard on Rumlow’s door.

The feed switched to the interior of Rumlow’s hospital room.Bucky—the nurse he was supposed to be—checked Rumlow’s vitals while he slept, then pulled up a chair.Sat, might have said something, but the camera was at his back and Steve couldn’t tell.Rumlow stirred, woke up.Looked at Bucky.What he was thinking, what he said, Steve couldn’t tell through the gauze burn mask.

Bucky moved, activated something, and the camera in Rumlow’s room went dead.Switched to a grainy zoom through the window of a hallway facing Rumlow’s room across the hospital’s courtyard.Too distant to make out anything more than the shape of Bucky sitting in the chair, the indistinct shape of Rumlow on the bed.No movement, for minutes.If they’d talked, the guard hadn’t heard it.Bucky stood.

The camera cut abruptly to Bucky leaving Rumlow’s room, smiling at the guard as he forged the nurse’s signature, then he was gone.Just like in Portland.

Rumlow denied Bucky ever visited him.Lying or so far gone on morphine at the time that he didn’t know it had happened, they couldn’t tell.Steve didn’t like any of the options.

Bucky knew, but didn’t tell the therapist or Hill or anyone else what happened.

Why did you go to him? _Shrug_.

What did you say to him? _Nothing_.

What did he say to you?  _Nothing_.

Bucky never lied so far as they could tell.  But he didn’t cooperate either.

Pictures on his cell phone, books in the apartment, Rumlow, none of it added up.Dozens and hundreds of pictures of food, or newspapers, or selfies, starting the afternoon after he went to Rumlow.No discernible pattern, except tracing Bucky’s footsteps as he worked his way through Hydra cells.Steve scrutinized the selfies, thought he saw Bucky coming back to himself, thought he saw Bucky as he used to be, but then he saw the real Bucky again, the one Shield locked away under a hundred feet of bedrock, and the photos looked brittle and fake.Bucky looked grim in the photos and grim under Shield’s harsh lights, his smile in the photos thin.

It didn't add up, and Steve twisted himself in knots trying to figure it out, trying to figure Bucky out.Thinking if he maybe watched the video one more time, looked through the photos one more time, looked through the list of books in Bucky’s apartment one more time, that maybe he’d figure out how to unlock Bucky now that they have him back.

* * *

**Sam**

The video is grainy, compressed too many times.Natasha says it’s scrubbed from where it leaked in a bundle of mundane zip files with nonsense names, but who knows where else it’s ended up.

Rumlow sets up the camera in what could be a conference room, one of those cabin type resorts where white people go to do trust falls.There’s a fucking moose wallpaper border and big fake logs framing a window overlooking pine trees.Somewhere in North America, evening, hard to tell the date or the place except that Rumlow looks about the same age as he did when Sam kicked his ass, but that doesn’t mean much.

The camera is probably someone’s phone or little handheld camcorder propped against something; it shakes every time someone walks by whatever it’s sitting on.Rumlow drapes himself into one of those cheap conference center rolling chairs as other Hydra assholes filter in, and of course they got caught because everyone smiles at the camera like it’s some kind of fucking joke.Some of them have takeout containers and beer, some of them spread blueprints or some shit across the table.There’s a goddamn powerpoint in the background.

Barnes moves across the frame before Sam realized it’s him because he moves like Rumlow.He’s wearing basically yoga pants and a tshirt, barefoot and hair up in a tight knot like he’s a dancer or just back from a workout.The rest of the team is in shades of Shield’s tac gear, boots and combat pants, and Barnes still looks like the most dangerous person in the room.It’s an unsettling, and Sam found himself avoiding looking at Barnes. 

Because whatever Sam expected the Winter Soldier to look like, it wasn’t this cool, steady remove, tracking the movement around the room from where he settles into a chair across the table from Rumlow.Barnes mirrors Rumlow’s posture, but with his joints stiff, almost locked up.Someone pours Barnes nearly an entire fifth of whiskey and he just drinks it.

Calories, because it's hell keeping up with Steve's metabolism and Barnes' is probably the same.Seventy to eighty calories per ounce of liquor, and if Barnes was anything like Steve he’d never get drunk off it.It explained the beer at Barnes’ apartment, maybe.Rumlow has a beer in his hand, the rest of the team is drinking.Steve said they used to drink in Brooklyn and Europe.A positive association, or a not-actively-bad association, maybe.Worrying either way.Didn’t quite explain the empty whiskey bottle under the sink Shield said they found in the inventory of the apartment; Barnes on his own hadn’t been hurting for calories, said he didn’t drink.Hard to go sober if it never made you drunk in the first place, so why the empty liquor bottle if Barnes didn’t drink.

The video’s of some kind of planning meeting, coordinating a hit, and Sam can’t figure out why they would bother recording it until Barnes speaks for the first time.He interrupts Rumlow, cuts him off to correct an angle, changes the plan.The rest of the team takes it in stride and adjusts the plan, and even with the table separating them and the grainy camera quality, Barnes checks Rumlow out.There’s a long look between them before Barnes goes back to drinking his whiskey.

Then meeting wraps up and the team starts to filter out, and this is what Natasha meant.Sam turned it off as soon as it became apparent how it would go.  

It’s not consented.It could not possibly have been consented, with the threat of force, years of conditioning, and God knows what else had been done to Barnes to make him the soldier.Legally, ethically, morally, it’s not consented.Can’t be.

But the way it’ll play in the press, when and not if it gets to the press, Barnes is the aggressor, moving what looks like of his own free will to crowd Rumlow’s space and kneel for him, initiating without a word between them as soon as everyone else is out of the room.Sam hated that he thought of the press first, because more importantly, it had to complicate what Barnes was dealing with in recovery.From Barnes’ reaction when Sam brought up Rumlow, to what Steve’s said about him, to the way Barnes avoided Sam’s space in the little kitchen, there’s someone in there that knows what happened was wrong, but he jumped right back in bed with Steve.

* * *

**Bucky**

The glass is repaired, but they’re warier of him now.Barnes can’t tell how much time he lost while they fixed it, what they might have done to Steve, who they’ve made him into.But really, they could have done that any time.Barnes watches the blurred shape of him approach the glass and sit, knees up and elbows on knees.Someone told him to sit like when they were kids, even if it doesn’t suit the body he’s in now.

“What happened with Rumlow?” Steve asks, and it’s only a surprise it took them this long to have Steve do the asking.The therapists he can play dumb with, go blank and only answer the question they ask.Cooperate by only giving them exactly what they ask for, doing exactly what they tell him.But Steve had always and will always look right through him, and they’ve either figured that out or Steve’s finally told them.

It’s not Steve’s fault Shield found them.He’d always been too trusting.It’s not Steve’s fault Shield’s using them against each other.It’d be kinder if Shield just wiped one or both of them, but he supposes that’s the point of having both of them.

It was just a pack of cards.

Barnes leans his head back against the slab bed.“He asked me to kill him.”If Steve’s shocked he doesn’t show it.He’s harder to read these days.Or maybe just harder for Barnes to read.

“But you didn’t,” Steve says.

“Leaving him alive seemed worse than how I’d planned to kill him.”

Steve watches him through the glass, that look on his face.All twisted around something and not happy to say it.“Your therapists said you remembered us charging a Russian artillery position together.Said you remembered the Russians massacring a town during the war.”

There’s a trap in their somewhere, but Barnes can’t quite see it. He picks his head up to look at Steve, painful as it is.It’s not Steve’s fault Shield's using him to twist the knife.

“That was the Charge of the Light Brigade, Buck,” Steve says, and there it is.“We watched it together in thirty-six.The movie palace on Pearl the summer I turned eighteen.”

Barnes takes a deep breath and tips his head back again.It’s not the worst thing Steve could throw at him.“One of the first things I remembered after pulling you out was Brooklyn burning the summer of thirty-nine.”

Steve’s face is harder, his mouth set.Barnes looks at him and back at the ceiling, the cameras.No point in hiding now.Better that there’s glass between them.Barnes got his last chance to touch Steve, so what’s it matter now.“That never happened, Buck,” Steve says.

“I know.Gone With the Wind.Knew as soon as I watched it.There’s a lot like that.”

Steve folds as Barnes keeps his eyes on the ceiling, the breath going out of Steve as he folds in on himself to put his face in his hands.


	8. It's All For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is short and not great, sorry. But I've been sitting on it this long trying to make it better and it's just not happening, so here it is. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**Steve**

It was a phyrrhic victory, if a victory at all.Hardly worth it.

Steve folded his arms over his chest, jaw tight as Coulson went through the terms of Bucky’s move, as if it were a negotiation.But Bucky’s in a basement in midtown, not Austria.It would be easier to run when they got out of the city, Steve told himself.It would be easier to run when Steve figured out if running would be better or worse for Bucky.

“You and I both know they’re not therapists,” Steve said when Coulson was finished rehearsing the farce.  

“Deprogramming, then,” Coulson said evenly.“You and Barnes will have your own residence, completely separate from the rest of the facility upstate.It’s very picturesque.”

“Dogs being put down get sent to a farm upstate.”Whether he or Bucky was the rabid dog wasn’t clear to Steve yet.

“Yes, they do, Captain,” Coulson says, and he’s not the same man who asked Steve to sign his trading cards.He’d burned down one Shield, only to have another grow up in its place.

 

**Bucky**

They’re skittish, spooked by him.It feels good.It feels familiar.They swim past him, distorted by the thick glass like he’s a shark being released in a tank of goldfish

“Can I have my phone back,” Barnes says, making the techs startle.There’s still a layer of bullet proof glass between them, but their supervisor frowns at him and the guards tighten their grips on their guns.Deviation from the schedule.He gets it.He’s an anomaly in the tight schedule of getting him prepped and ready to move.

“Why,” the supervisor says through the glass.

“Because it’s mine.Because you took it.”Because it has everything on it that matters and he was stupid to let them take it, and now they know that.Because he wants it and it’s been so long since he wanted anything besides Steve.

They leave the clothes and the soft soled shoes in the tray, giving him the bare privacy of changing in front of just the guards and not all the techs.The guards don’t care, he doesn’t are, and they get along just fine.Practically professional.

The phone they bring him isn’t his, but it’s very good, only a bare quarter gram or so heavier.He doesn’t bother looking through the photos because it’ll be impossible to tell whether they changed anything, just like it’s impossible to tell with himself, or Steve, or anything else.He wanted it because he wanted it, and that has to be enough from now on.

The soft soled shoes slip on the polished floors, and he supposes that’s the point.

 

**Steve**

Coulson’s therapists called it supervised residential treatment, but what it meant was another three hour drive up the Hudson to the underground facility in the back of a repainted Hydra van, and it gave Steve creeping shudders the whole way.Bucky went placidly, looking so unlike himself but so unlike the caged feral animal kept under glass that Steve couldn’t help wondering if this was how he’d been made by Hydra, compliant and easy to manage, or by Shield, sedated and tractable.They were taken to the repainted van together, the one Rumlow’s Strike team piled Steve and Natasha and Sam into, and the only reason Bucky didn’t get ratcheted down in place was because Steve sat there himself and glared down Coulson’s lackeys until they let Bucky settle into the van with only the magcuffs.  

Only.  

As if there was anything acceptable about it.

Shield put them in a doll’s house, visible on all sides and fake.Fake furniture, bolted down, fake windows, bullet proof and impossible to open, fake doors, lockable from the outside.Unlockable from the outside.

The new Strike team escorted them to the door and handed Steve the key, guns drawn on Bucky until he stepped in the door.Steve looked them all up and down slowly, memorizing their faces, taking one last look at Coulson smiling placidly behind them, and followed Bucky.

 

**Bucky**

Remanded to care.  Got a sharp plastic house arrest bracelet on his ankle and a chip somewhere under the skin of his shoulder blade, but that’s alright.  There’s three bugs in the residence that he can confirm, and two more that he suspects but can’t check out without giving it away.  Not all of them active, but they won’t be, rotating in and out to hide from electronic sweep.  Shield’s or Hydra’s or someone else’s doesn’t much matter, him and Steve both under constant surveillance.  They’re both on the same leash, just Barnes’ is a little tighter.  Same as it always was.  At least he has Steve this time around.  Maybe the best way it all could have gone.

 

**Steve**

They lay in bed nose to nose that first night, both of them just watching each other.Bucky smelled different, and Steve didn’t recognize his own reflection in Bucky’s dark eyes.Bucky closed his eyes first and Steve couldn’t make himself ask—any of it, really.An apology caught in his throat, and Bucky must have heard it, pulling Steve closer.

They settled into a routine, and if at first Steve thought that leaving Bucky alone while he went jogging or across the campus for work would be the worst, it was actually the coming back that ground him down, worse every time so that Steve caught himself putting off going home as long as he could.Every time he walked out the door it got harder to say anything when he came back.

Bucky waited for him the first night at six on the dot, exactly when he said he’d be back.Bucky sat there with perfectly combed hair and the clothes Steve had made Shield order for him, painfully still on the couch with book in hand and back to the door.The oven dinged as the door clicked shut behind Steve.  

No dirty socks on the floor, dishes done, and Steve almost backed out the door right then, shaken.Because the little doll house was cleaner than Steve ever kept it, cleaner than Bucky’s apartment in Albany, cleaner than their place before the war.

But Steve sat down, and they ate dinner, and went to bed.Bucky had dinner ready exactly on time the next night, and the next, and Bucky dutifully told Steve about the novels he read and the therapists he talked to, like their little domestic fantasy was real.Like he believed Steve believed this was for Bucky’s own good, when Steve could see clearly on Bucky’s face that he didn’t think so.

Shield delivered their groceries and their laundry and their carefully censored mail, to the point that Steve couldn’t even tell what was missing and drove himself crazy trying to guess.  

Bucky played out the part that Shield had written for him perfectly.Act one, torture.Act two, redemption.Act three, contrition and recovery.Or something like that.Steve didn’t think he’d gotten a copy of the same script.

Bucky drank.More or less all day, Steve knew it even though they never talked about it.That wasn’t in the script, Steve didn’t think, but he didn’t say anything about it, because can you have a drinking problem if you can’t get drunk?Bucky didn’t hide it, but he didn’t do it in front of Steve either, three and four bottles of beer gone at the end of every day.Then six.Then eight.Shield delivered more with the groceries, and a bottle of whiskey when Steve asked for it.That was gone two days later, after Steve had a thimble full.

Steve stopped telling Bucky when to expect him, because he couldn’t take the guilt of coming home to find Bucky waiting for him dutifully.  Couldn’t handle the weight of Bucky carefully pretending for his benefit that everything was fine.Couldn’t handle telling him that Steve hadn’t figured a way out of this for them, that now they were both in a glass box as much as Bucky had been in midtown.

Bucky couldn’t get drunk any more than Steve could, but he understood Bucky’s drinking when Steve came home one night and sat heavily beside him, head in hands.Bucky watched him for a minute, book on his knee to mark his place, and didn’t say a word.Then he got up and left Steve there, padded to the kitchenette because they hadn’t given Bucky any shoes and Steve’s didn’t fit him, and he brought back two bottles of beer.Steve got it then, the empty whiskey bottle under Bucky’s sink in Albany, the drinking since being locked in the dollhouse.

It was pointless and comforting and familiar, a ritual that should have meant something, like the first time Bucky died.Pointless, like the rest of their lives.


	9. I've Made Mistakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm pretty burnt out on this fic for reasons I don't even know, and I can't figure out how to finish it in a satisfying way. I'm going to finish it off just so that I can have it over with and move on to other things, but it'll probably be an unsatisfying ending. Sorry.

**Sam**

Sam tried the enthusiastic consent conversation once.

He knew they slept together, because Shield knew they slept together. Steve was either willfully or naively blind to to the problem with that, just shook his head and said that was how Bucky wanted it when Sam tried to hint that maybe one bed in a fishbowl might be a little too much together time.

Sam couldn't do much, but he could do the enthusiastic consent conversation. Not as though Coulson or anyone else would tell Barnes what he didn't have to do. Not that Sam would put it past Coulson and friends to use the whole shitty situation against Steve and Barnes both.

So he found himself standing on the doorstep with Barnes scowling at him like he'd shown up with a bag of dogshit. Not like it was hard to get him alone, Steve spending his days as far across the complex as he could.

“Look,” Sam said, sweating there on the doorstep like he was there for prom, so he got straight to it. “I know Steve and you are figuring things out, but you don't have to go along with anything you don't want to do. He's not going to care that you had sex with other people—“

“It wasn’t sex,” Barnes said, tone flat and dangerous.

Sam stared at him, because what the fuck just came out of his mouth. “God, I—oh my god. Barnes, I’m sorry,” Sam said.

Barnes gave him a long look and turned away, leaving Sam standing there in the doorway with Shield watching his back.

  
  


**Steve**

It was a good day.

Or, it was a good day until Steve went home.

Home. The glass box they kept Bucky in.

Sam clapped him on the shoulder after their run, almost normal. Like DC, like when they'd been working together.

“You okay?” Sam said as they walked it off. Stopped and looked Steve up and down with a smile, but looked him up and down all the same, and not like when they'd been flirting.

“Sure,” Steve said, and mostly meant it. He avoided Sam's look, knowing he was doing it, pretending to stretch out.

“Everything okay at home?” Sam said, and there it was.

Steve cracked his back and turned to head in to the locker room showers. “Sure. Why wouldn't it be?”

“You've just been spending a lot of time in training,” Sam shrugged, still standing where they'd stopped so that Steve had to look back at him.

Sam know what he was doing, he knew Steve that well, and Steve couldn't figure out if he appreciated it or not. The little glass box they kept Bucky in was framed right past Sam's shoulder, set off in greenspace where the rest of the campus had clear sightlines to it three sixty. Where Steve could avoid it and keep it in his peripheral all day, circle around it like that wasn't what he was doing.

Steve met Sam's long look, uncertain where he stood in this. If he was in Coulson's pocket, he wouldn't be so direct. Steve had trusted him in DC for a reason.

He clapped Sam on the shoulder and went to shower at home, and wished he hadn't.

He twigged to it before the door even opened, and he couldn't have said how because Bucky stood dead silent with his back to the far wall, the three agents with their backs to the door.

“The fuck is this,” Steve said, the sweat down his back gone cold where he stood in the doorway.

The agent at the kitchen table turned to look at him; the two others kept guns trained on Bucky. The one at the kitchen table had a crisp bun and a bland face, professional and blank with a bunch of kale in one hand and their mail in the other.

“Groceries,” Bucky said, and Steve got it. This wasn't a recovery; this was trying to break Bucky or provoke him into snapping.

Bucky, or Steve.

“Get out,” Steve said. The two with the guns didn't move a muscle. “Get out, he's not going to make a bomb with pancake mix.”

The woman with the kale set it down, perfectly bland and professional as Coulson. “We're done here,” she said, and smiled, and they left.

Bucky held perfectly still against the wall, his facade of normal cracked as Steve stood there shaking and useless. Bucky wore a soft gray sweater over blue flannel like he had in Portland but the look in his eye was pure Winter Soldier, wild and drawn tight.

Bucky broke eye contact first, taking a shuddering breath as he came back to himself.

“Bucky, we’re going to get out of this,” Steve said, because he needed to believe it, because he needed Bucky to make him believe it.

“You know they’re listening,” Bucky said, without meeting his eyes.  “There’s cameras on all the windows.”

And—yeah.  Steve tried not to actively think about it, no one had told him, but he knew.  He hadn’t told Bucky about the fake tooth in his own mouth, but Shield didn’t even need that.

“When’s your handler coming back?” Bucky asked, voice flat.  No affect.

“Sam’s not my handler, Buck.  We talked about this.”

Bucky frowned at the floor.  No affect in his voice lately, but Bucky had never been able to keep his face from betraying him.  “Yeah,” he said finally.

Steve sagged to the kitchen table, strings cut, and heaved the breath he'd been holding. The paranoia, the tension was too much. The kale lay wilting on the tabletop, their grocery delivery scattered. Now that Steve knew to look for it, the packaging was all carefully opened, the seams inspected, the mail opened and resealed. He knew they did it, but he never thought they'd make Bucky watch it every day, and to what end.

Bucky eased himself into a chair, hands flat on the table and both of them sitting where they had dinner. Steve glanced around the apartment, out the window where the camera would be.  He took another breath and pulled an envelope and a pen to himself from across the table.

 _No cameras in the house?_ Steve wrote, and passed it to Bucky.

Bucky took the pen in his right hand, and Steve’s heart stopped.  The metal left hand stayed flat on the table top. 

 _Not yet_ , Bucky wrote, agonizingly slow, in unsteady, unfamiliar handwriting.  Sister Bernadette would have wept.

“You used to be left handed,” Steve said, because it hurt not to, because it hurt to watch Bucky struggle with the pen, because he had to, and Bucky’s head snapped up.

Of all the moments Steve dreaded since the video, it was this one.  Confronting the question of whether this was really Bucky.

But a Hydra counterfeit wouldn’t look so horrified, and Steve hated himself as soon as he said it.  “I—“ Bucky choked.  “I—this was always how they—I never, since—“

Steve put a hand on Bucky’s left, the plates of it horribly still, hand flat as Bucky stared at him.  “Buck—Bucky, I’m sorry.  It’s okay,” Steve said, even though it wasn’t.

“It’s—been a while,” Bucky said.  Dropped his eyes to the table top again.  Since 1944, Steve guessed.  Muscle memory gone with the hand.  Steve let Bucky pull his hand away, watched him lean on the table with head in hands.  “I can’t do this, Steve,” Bucky said quietly.

Steve took one shuddery breath and another and just sat there, because it wasn’t fair to Bucky if he cried.  
  
  


**Bucky**

The handlers—therapists—ask what that means, later.  They ask what Steve wrote, what Barnes wrote.  It’s like when they asked him about the pictures on his phone.  Why the pictures of food.  Why the selfies.  Why here, why there.  They mean exactly what they mean, but the handlers want it all to mean something more than it does.

Wilson brings donuts the next morning and asks how things are.  Steve and the handler go running like usual.

  
  


**Sam**

“I need to make a dentist appointment,” Steve said between breaths.

Sam looked at him sideways, not exactly sure what that meant but sure it was a test. Out here, away from Barnes. Away from the little doll house and anywhere else Shield might have put ears. “I don't know a good one, but I can ask Nat,” Sam said.

Steve nodded without looking at him, so maybe he'd passed the test.

 

**Steve**

He still went out with the team, because what else was he supposed to do. The world hadn't stopped, even though it had stopped for Bucky.

And, selfishly, he needed the sense of normality even if was only for two or three days at a time. At what price he didn't think about until too late.

It was Albany all over again, except this time he and Nat touched down in New York twelve hours ahead of schedule, battered and exhausted. They stumbled off the tarmac just before dawn, Nat hot on his heels when Steve took one look towards home and took off running.

There were fifteen of them, dark and indistinct as Steve pushed his way through the front door, shouting down the Strike team standing with guns drawn in his own fucking living room.  Except Natasha was at Steve’s back this time, both of them still dirty from the call that was supposed to be thirty-six hours and not twenty-four, and Steve didn’t miss that the tac team stood down as soon as she gave the order.

Dark as the apartment was, Steve couldn’t miss Bucky.  Face down on the floor, hands cuffed behind him. Still in the same tshirt and flannel pajamas as when Steve had left two days before.  Eyes blown wide and absolutely, terrifyingly still, looking to Steve like Steve had any more control over this situation.  One of the Strike team in full tac gear and mask stood with their boot on Bucky’s back, gun drawn like he was any kind of threat.

“Uncuff him,” Steve said, and not a goddamn one of them moved.  “ _Uncuff him_.”

“Let him up,” Natasha said, and they moved at that, the one with the boot hauling Bucky standing, two more moving between Bucky and Steve.

“He went silent and non-visible for thirty-six hours,” one of the tac team said.  Behind the mask, they could have been anyone.  Could have been Rumlow or Rollins, for all Steve knew.  Rumlow or Rollins could have been anyone before, and Steve didn’t know then either.  “We had orders to bring him in.”

“I was in bed,” Bucky said, voice rough, and the tac team stiffened.  Bucky kept his face down and his shoulders up, eyes screwed shut and waiting.  “Didn’t have a reason to get up,” Bucky said, and Steve didn’t realize he’d taken a heavy step towards the tac team until Natasha put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“Out,” Natasha said. A ripple went through the Strike team, coming to point on her. “Get out, and go get Coulson out of bed.”

 

**Bucky**

He spends his days at the kitchen table after that, making sure they can see him. Steve's gone for hours or days on end, arguing to Coulson or Romanoff or Pierce. No use pretending at normal for the handlers anymore.

Barnes stays where they can see him.

 


End file.
